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Comment by plerpin | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting a kick out of these performance numbers. It's a common refrain on HN condemning $BIG_COMPANY for not using homomorphic encryption for $CLOUD_SERVICE.

With these performance numbers in hand, I'm finding those posts retroactively hilarious.

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Do people really condemn companies for not using FHE? Anyone who knows anything even remotely about FHE knows that its not practical in real applications yet, and won't be for a while.

I can't think of any such instances. I suspect GP is thinking of something else.

Is it really that common? I often see HN posts calling for end-to-end encryption, but not homomorphic encryption.

(But even "just" end-to-end encryption is more difficult than many realize.)

Most people asking for mandatory e2ee everywhere to protect their privace do so only because they have heard from someone that it is a good idea.

Most often they do not understand the tradeoffs that come with mandatory e2ee (difficult information transfer, easy loss of data, no server-side search, etc), and are not ready to deal with them.

You should compare them to what the performance numbers where 5 and 10 years ago. Homomorphic crypto systems have become many orders of magnitude faster quite rapidly. While they are still no where near non-homomorphic solutions (and likely won't ever be), they have only recently become practical for applications where performance doesn't matter and privacy is valuable (in the sense that people pay a premium for it, which is often not the case).

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